IBC Accelerator 2023 - Responsive Narrative Factory
MetaRex showed a hugely successful demo of Hyper-personalization with our partners.
Making Rex, Insights from our Creative Team Meet the creatives behind Rex: Amber Bardell is a multidisciplinary creative with a passion for tactile art techniques. You’ll often find them painting walls, or canvas. Their trusty iPad is the digital canvas where most of the MetaRex visual concepts …
Read more
MetaRex at IBC 2023 - the Responsive Narrative Factory The Responsive Narrative Factory ( RNF ) is an [IBC Accelerator] project that will be showcased at this year’s IBC show between 15 & 18 September at the RAI centre, Amsterdam.
We’re teaming up with [Infuse Video], the [BBC], …
Read more
An Introduction to Metarex
What is MetaRex?
Metarex is an initiative dedicated to developing an open-source framework for the transport of media metadata. This framework will allow you to preserve, transport, identify, and use metadata from many sources in a single workflow. This will make it easier to manage metadata and ensure that it is accurate and consistent whenever video content is processed, broadcast, or distributed.
Why is MetaRex needed?
There is currently no standard way to transport media metadata. The lack of transport medium can cause these metadata issues:
- It is lost or corrupted during the production process
- Incompatibility with different software applications
- Difficulties in managing and searching
How will MetaRex help improve metadata management?
MetaRex will create a standardised way to transport metadata, ensuring that metadata is always transported in the same way, regardless of the software application used. This will make it easier to manage and search metadata, and it will also reduce the risk of metadata being lost or corrupted.
MetaRex will make metadata interoperable, which means that it will be compatible with different software applications. This will make it easier to share metadata between different systems, and it will also make it easier to access metadata from different sources.
MetaRex will be extensible, meaning new metadata formats can be easily added to the framework. This will ensure that MetaRex can support the latest metadata standards, and it will also make it easier to add new metadata fields to the framework.
Who is behind the MetaRex project and how is it funded?
The MetaRex team is led by renowned media technologist Bruce Devlin , who has had a significant impact on the way that media is produced and distributed. Devlin is a former head of standards for SMPTE and a member of the EBU. He is passionate about open-source solutions and is committed to making the media industry more accessible and efficient. MetaRex is a not-for-profit initiative and is funded by donations from companies that will benefit from free-flowing metadata.
How will MetaRex benefit me?
We can help you streamline your workflows and connect you with our growing network of companies. Your involvement will give you the opportunity to adapt the Metarex framework to your requirements and allow you to be first to market.
Why not arrange a meeting and see how we can help?
You can download a PDF of this document
Our Backers
MetaRex is like Fedex for metadata.
- Sender
- The Sender wraps their metadata in a standardized container.
- A label is applied to identify the contents
- The mapper puts the container on a transport: NDI, ST 2110, email, FTP etc.
- Receiver
- The receiver takes the containers from the transport
- The unwrapper reads the label to handle the data as clocked / unclocked, text / binary
- The unwrapper extracts the metadata and may use a web service to do something automatic with the data e.g. make an overlay / transcode to the receiver’s preferred format.
- The end user now has access to, potentially, several variants of the metadata before they write their first line of code.
MetaRex will create free Open Source software (FOSS) to handle media metadata.
MetaRex will encourage all tool vendors to use MetaRex FOSS in their products.
MetaRex places metadata in a standard wrapper with standard identifiers.
MetaRex uses proven, sample accurate timing model for live & offline.
MetaRex raises funds to give grants for a freely available open source media metadata transport framework.
MetaRex enables you to gather, transport, identify and use metadata from many sources in workflows.
MetaRex is raising funds to give grants for a freely available open source media metadata transport framework.
MetaRex enables you to gather, transport, identify and use metadata from many sources in a single workflow.
MetaRex is a UK Limited Company that exists for the following reasons:
- Raise funds to create the MetaRex Open Source Software
- Maintain a board until end 2024
- Maintain a website to run the project & communicate results
- Publish the workplan to build the Software
- Distribute funds to project grant applicants (companies & individuals)
- Dissolve itself after 2 years at the boards discretion
Board
A board of 3-7 members is initially created from the Gold Tier backers. The company health is led by the Executive Director and the work is coordinated by the Gold & Silver Tier backers.
Work Plan
The work plan is managed in working groups that comprise small, targetted work packages that result in:
- Open Source Code including SDK, apps, schemas, encoding, registration & processing.
- Open Source Hardware Definitions.
- Public Domain Data (for testing, registration, operational use).
- Specification documents - machine readable where possible.
- A free to access register for public projects
Timeframe
The initial backers, company incorpration, board and draft work plan will be in place by 2022-12-31. First grant applications & proposals can be received against the work plan 2023-01-01. Gantt Chart on the Project page.
The project will continue until 2024-12-31 and then be wound up by the board leaving all code and open source content in place with a sustaining plan to ensure it’s longevity.